Museum aglow with new additions

Wednesday

Nov 21, 2012 at 10:18 AMNov 21, 2012 at 10:23 AM

Luke Smucker

Updates to the Pontiac-Oakland Car Museum’s library and the fundraising campaign for “Old Jim,” the life-sized plaster mannequin of a dapple-gray horse, provide new reasons to check out the car museum.Tim Dye, curator for the museum, hopes to raise funds for the restoration of “Old Jim,” a plaster horse that was once on display in a harness and horse goods store in Fairbury. The goal is for the horse to be restored at a cost of around $1,500 to $2,000 by early January. Since his arrival inside the museum last month, the horse, attached to antique Oakland buggy, has been given a feedbag for a donation campaign called “Save Old Jim … Stuff the Feed Bag” where people can put their donations. Thus far, the horse campaign has only received $10, but Dye hopes that will change as people come into the museum again to check out other new additions.“They can put checks or cash in his feed bag,” said Dye. “Anything they want to drop in there would be helpful for sure and with his local history, it’s a neat tie-in that we can use and preserve him here in a place where people can come in and see him.”Another donation that has the museum aglow is a lighted Pontiac dealership sign and a 2007 Pontiac Solstice on loan.The sign came from the Bob Battjes Pontiac dealership in Elkhart, Ind., where the vehicle was originally purchased, Dye said.The library area of the museum also has received new additions into and within the library. A wooden door with a glass window stating, “Pontiac-Oakland Library and Ephemera collections, please ask for assistance,” is now placed at the entrance to the library area. The text on door was hand-painted by Bill Diaz of Diaz Sign Art. Dye said the idea was to keep the text font on the door within the same era as the building.“People are still more than welcome to come and look at the library,” said Dye. “It’s just that we are going to help them more, so that we can keep the Pontiac-Oakland Club materials separate from our own collection — we don’t want to get that mixed up.”Dye said the best part about the new literary additions is that it makes the museum library the biggest collection of literature and reference materials on Pontiac-Oakland vehicles in the United States. The club is also going to offer the museum financial help, which Dye said they plan on using to purchase a new copier and a computer on which the inventory of the library can be accessed and stored. “The goal is to make it so that eventually people can look things up from the library without having to handle the actual pieces,” said Dye. “There are pieces from our collection from the 1890s and we want to try and keep everyone from handling it as much as possible, but we still want to be able to share it. We are really excited about that because it really steps us up in our library section.”Along with about 80 boxes on the shelves in the library, which are separated by year, Dye also has 70 banker’s boxes in storage that have not been looked through. Dye said last weekend, when the materials were delivered from their previous home in Hershey, Pa., he put them in storage and then went to attend the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals which were held at the Stevens Convention Center in Rosemont.“We had a great opportunity to promote the city and the museum at the show,” said Dye. “So, I have not had a lot of time to search through it much yet, but I am pretty anxious to get through it.”